This excellent content from the Hackaday writing crew highlights recurring topics and popular series like Linux-Fu, 3D-Printering, Hackaday Links, This Week in Security, Inputs of Interest, Profiles in Science, Retrotechtacular, Ask Hackaday, Teardowns, Reviews, and many more.
In this session of Logic Noise, we’ll be playing around with the voltage-controlled oscillator from a 4046 phase-locked loop chip, and using it to make “musical” pitches. It’s a lot of bang for the buck, and sets us on the path toward much more interesting circuits in the future. So watch the intro video right after the break, and we’ll dig straight in.
Continue reading “Logic Noise: 4046 Voltage-Controlled Oscillator, Part One”
The 23rd DEFCON — the Western Hemisphere’s largest hacker conference — doesn’t start until tomorrow but Thursday has become the de facto start for regulars. [Brian] and I rolled into town this afternoon and are working on gathering as much information as possible about the badge challenge.
This year the badge is a 7″ vinyl record. Traditionally the badge alternates years of electronic badges and ones that aren’t. Spend your weekend pulling your hair our trying to solve the puzzles. Check out all the pictures and information (updated as we gather it) and work together collaboratively for a solution by requesting to join the crew on the Badge Hacking page.
If you’re in town Sunday morning, come nurse your hangover with [Brian], [Eric], and me. We’re headed to Va Bene Caffè at 10:30am on 8/9/15. It’s just across the street in the Cosmopolitan. Request to join this event and I’ll send you a reminder so you don’t forget. You can also hit me up on Twitter for a reminder. See you then (and don’t forget to bring hardware to show off if you have some!).
PS- The Hackaday WiFi Hat is in play. Anyone have the chops to hack it this year?
Not long after [Hitler] took control of Germany, his party passed laws forbidding any persons of Jewish descent from holding academic positions in German Universities. This had the effect of running many of the world’s smartest people out of the country, including [Albert Einstein]. Einstein settled into his new home in Princeton, and began to seek out bright young mathematicians to work with, for he still had a bone to pick with [Niels Bohr] and his quantum theory. It wasn’t long until he ran into an American, [Nathan Rosen] and a Russian, [Boris Podolsky]. The trio would soon lay before the world a direct challenge that would strike at the very core of quantum theory’s definition of reality. And unlike the previous challenges, this one would not be so easily dismissed by [Bohr].
Need a bit of catching up? You can check out Complimentarity as well as Tunneling and Transistors but that is just some optional background for wrapping your head around Quantum Computing.
On May 4th, 1935, the New York Times published an article entitled “Einstein Attacks Quantum Theory”, which gave a non technical summary of the [Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen] paper. We shall do something similar.
Continue reading “Quantum Mechanics In Your Processor: Quantum Computing”
Electrical engineer and music enthusiast [Freidrich Trautwein] was dissatisfied. He believed that the equal tempered scale of the piano limited a player’s room for expression. And so in 1930, [Trautwein] and an accomplished pianist named [Oskar Sala] began work on an electro-mechanical instrument that would bring the glissando of the string section’s fretless fingerboards to the keyboard player. [Trautwein] called his creation the Trautonium.
Sound is produced in the instrument by sawtooth frequency generators. It is then passed through filters and manipulated by the resistive string-based manuals. Frequency and intonation are varied relative to the position of the player’s finger along a length of non-conductive string and to the amount of pressure applied. This resistive string is suspended above a conductive metal strip between a pair of posts. A small voltage is applied to the posts so that when the string touches the metal strip below, the player manipulates a voltage-controlled oscillator. A series of metal tongues, also non-conductive, hover above the string. These are placed at scale intervals and can be used like keys.
This early synthesizer is capable of producing many kinds of sounds, from crisp chirps to wet, slapping sounds and everything in between. In fact, all of the sound effects in Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller The Birds were produced on a modified Trautonium by the instrument’s one and only master, [Oskar Sala]. He went on to score hundreds of films by watching them with the Trautonium at his fingertips, recording and layering his compositions into an eerie wall of sound.
Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: The Trautonium Was Elemental To Electronic Music”
One of our favorite nuances of the C programming language (and its descendants) is the static keyword. It’s a little bit tricky to get your head around at first, because it can have two (or three) subtly different applications in different situations, but it’s so useful that it’s worth taking the time to get to know.
And before you Arduino users out there click away, static variables solve a couple of common problems that occur in Arduino programming. Take this test to see if it matters to you: will the following Arduino snippet ever print out “Hello World”?
void loop()
{
int count=0;
count = count + 1;
if (count > 10) {
Serial.println("Hello World");
}
}
Continue reading “Embed With Elliot: The Static Keyword You Don’t Fully Understand”
Week 25 of the Caption CERN Contest is complete. Thanks to all the entrants who tried to figure out exactly what is going on with this scientist and his strange box. We’re still just as confused (and amused) as you are. He definitely is focused on the box and whatever is in there.
So, without further adieu, here are the winners of this week’s contest:
The Funnies:
This week’s winner is [Jack Laidlaw] with “At Cern you have to be careful when having fun with the new guy, John was sent for a bucket of steam and only reappeared 6 months later with this contraption.” Jack is a web designer based in Scotland. He’s an avid fan of electronics, and is going to be getting a hands on course with his new Teensy 3.1 from The Hackaday Store!
After 25 great weeks of the Caption CERN Contest, it’s time to take a bit of a break. The Hackaday Prize competition is really heating up, along with plenty of other work here at Hackaday HQ. I’ve said it each week, but I have to give one more big thank you to all the folks who have entered and made this a great contest. It’s been a pleasure to read the captions every week and to award the prizes to all the top captions. The science and fun don’t end here though – There are plenty of images in CERN’s archives waiting to be discovered. Take some time and browse through. You won’t regret it!
Finally, I’d just like to say don’t forget to document your own work, and take notes on what each image contains. Be it on Hackaday.io, on Github, or even on your own drive. Otherwise you might see your own hacks in the next incarnation of the Caption CERN Contest!
Over the last few years, Maker’s Asylum in Mumbai has grown from a garage to a very well stocked workspace with 140 members. They’re getting kicked out at the end of the month and they need some help. We just had a meetup at the Delhi branch of Maker’s Asylum, and these guys and gals are really cool.
Speaking of crowdfunding campaigns for hackerspaces, South Central Pennsylvania might be getting its own hackerspace. The 717 area code is a vast wasteland when it comes to anything anyone reading Hackaday would consider interesting, despite there being plenty of people who know their way around CNC machines, soldering irons, and welders. This needs to happen.
Need some help with Bluetooth standards? Tektronix has you covered with a gigantic poster of the physical layer. If only there were a repository of these handy, convenient reference posters.
Forgings and castings make for great YouTube videos, and this aluminum bell casting is no exception. There’s about 18 pounds of aluminum in there, which is pretty large as far as home casting goes.
Electronic Goldmine has an assortment of grab bags – spend a few dollars get a bag of chips, LEDs, diodes, or what have you. What’s in these grab bags? [alpha_ninja] found out. There’s some neat stuff in there, except for the ‘SMD Mixture’ bag.
Remember the found case molds for the Commodore 64C that became a Kickstarter? It’s happening again with the Amiga 1200. This is a new mold with a few interesting features that support the amazing amount of upgrades that have come out for this machine over the years. Being new molds, the price per piece is a little high, but that’s your lesson in manufacturing costs for the day.
